During 1963 I wrote and produced this – the first rock-climbing guide to NSW. Please click on “The Rock-Climbs of NSW, 1963 – book”(pdf) for the actual book.

I arrived back in Australia at the beginning of 1962. Previously to this (while at Uni) I had climbed fairly extensively in the UK. In Australia I rapidly started climbing regularly with SRC members.
          In the UK there was already an extensive rock-climbing guide-book system covering most of the important crags. There was none in Australia (at least there certainly wasn’t in NSW). I decided a guide-book must be written. Charlie Ivan was talking about it but didn’t seem to be making any progress. So I decided I would take on the job.
          I wanted to do the job properly. So I resolved to do every know climb first. This wasn’t too difficult because there was no more than 200 climbs that people knew about in NSW. So I think almost every climb in this guide has been done by myself.
          So this is the guide.

In this webpage I will just show 4 significant pages. To see more than this (and read these items in detail), you must download the guide – it will only take about a minute.

On the top right is my cover page. You can see I went to the trouble of putting an individual photograph on the front of every guide book.

This is my contents page. You can see here that this guide covered every known climbing area in NSW.

Below are two quite important pages with diagrams.
          On the left, I show a diagram of the original route up the face of King George (now called Mt Banks). In the late 1990s I took a party of 4 climbers up this very route. Now I had already done this climb three times before in the 1960s and then I done the route without any problems. So I didn’t check in my old guide-book as to where the old route went. This was a terrible mistake. We got lost and benighted. So this old guide-book can still be useful, if you want to find where some of these old routes go.
          On the right, I show the early stages of how my new bolting system was developing.

Please now have a look at the whole guide “The Rock-Climbs of NSW, 1963 – book”(pdf).

You might now also like to look back at:
either my “Home Page” (which introduces this whole website and lists all my webpages),
or “My Climbing” (which introduces this major set of webpages).

My next normal webpage is “Four Deaths on the Crags”.

Updated on 14/11/2016.